Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

PSA: don't order from SeeTickets. They passed my details on to some sort of scam company called Complete Savings. Bank says I should be able to get my money back but it seems like a pretty huge GDPR breach, as well as, you know, theft!

BREAKING: Congress just reintroduced the dangerous #EarnItAct, an internet surveillance bill that makes all of us less safe by attacking online encryption. We’ve killed this bill 💀twice 💀, and we’re going to do it again at https://www.noearnitact.org/

Now, here’s a refresher:

Damn, this sucks...
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About 60% of monkeys, apes, and lemurs are currently threatened with extinction, and climate change is only a part of it.

Habitat loss, hunting, the illegal pet trade, and disease have already cut back primate populations. Climate change will likely increase the duration and intensity of extreme weather events such as cyclones and droughts, putting more pressure on the survival of already struggling species.

FULL ARTICLE -- https://theconversation.com/monkeys-lemurs-and-apes-at-risk-climate-change-threatens-a-quarter-of-worlds-primate-habitat-161955

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency #Extinction

Who are the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary forces who have provoked an escalating civil war with the Sudanese government?

Known as the Janjawids, these mercenaries accumulated arms, funds, and recruits as shock troops in conflicts throughout the region. Sudanese dictator Omar Al-Bashir was one of their chief funders. They began by crushing a rebellion in the western region of Darfur and went on to play a role in violence in Yemen and elsewhere. In 2019, after demonstrators successfully toppled Al-Bashir, the Rapid Support Forces carried out a massacre to regain control of the capital, Khartoum.

We documented their rise in this text:

https://crimethinc.com/2019/06/14/sudan-behind-the-massacre-in-khartoum-the-perpetrators-and-the-backstory

Now the Rapid Support Forces are fighting against the Sudanese military, at great cost to ordinary people in Sudan.

The militarization of a society does not benefit anyone in the long run, not even the rulers.

#Sudan

Friends -- please check out this event. Hastily publicized but there are great people participating and it should be a serious conversation about some challenging issues in co-op organization. Especially the role of workers in consumer and multi-stakeholder cooperatives.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/owning-together-worker-consumer-co-ops-in-conversation-registration-615930553867?aff=ebdssbonlinesearch

After five years of helping to build hardware and software that protects people's privacy, security and freedom, at the end of the month I will no longer be at Purism (I'll still be helping out as an advisor).

For the near term, I plan to spend my time promoting my new book (coming very soon), writing yet another book, and thinking about what's next for my career.

If you have any suggestions for what I should do next, email me at next@kylerank.in (DMs are disabled on this instance).

For years I've been supporting nonprofits to transition from power-over to power-sharing. A tiny slice of that is practicing #workplacedemocracy, and I've finally put together a corner of the Internet to gather resources on the topic and advertise the services that I and my co-organizers offer. Want to take a look and tell what's confusing, what's missing from the Library, or how to improve? This is the beta version! https://www.tosstheboss.org/library

If you installed a Linux system with disk encryption more than a couple of years ago, there's a decent chance it's using a weak key derivation function and someone who cares enough would be in a position to brute-force it. https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html has more details and instructions on how to update to a better KDF.

Missouri's transgender snitch form would have been right at home in the most evil days of the old East German regime:

Hey, if you use WordPress and you also use Redis, is there a trick for getting the site to update properly when you create a new post? I have to wind up flushing Redis cache and THEN flush site cache these days, and it's really annoying.

Ivan, an imprisoned anarchist in France, released a public letter last week in which he says that the police managed to break the LUKS encryption on his Linux laptop. The password was longer than 20 characters:

https://nantes.indymedia.org/posts/87395/une-lettre-divan-enferme-a-la-prison-de-villepinte-perquisitions-et-disques-durs-dechiffres/

They had the computer since last summer, so there was enough time to brute force the PW using cloud computing, though it would certainly have been expensive.

This enemy site talks about using up to 10,000 computers with GPU acceleration to attack a LUKS password:

https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2020/08/breaking-luks-encryption/

All of which is to say that what constitutes a good password has changed. One guideline is to use seven random words -- easy to remember,hard to force.

#technology

Philanthropy exists to launder the reputations of the rich.

Just read the draft Generative AI guidelines that China dropped last week. If anything like this ends up becoming law, the US argument that we should tiptoe around regulation 'cos China will beat us will officially become hogwash.
Here are some things that stood out. 🧵

Given the government’s long history of using and abusing incredibly invasive techniques, people in the United States should push for more robust human rights safeguards.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/us-deserves-stronger-spyware-protections-bidens-executive-order

Scientists discover that fungi can effectively break down plastic - https://boingboing.net/2023/04/16/scientists-discover-that-fungi-can-effectively-break-down-plastic.html more like this, please...

lol jk 😂

https://dcist.com/story/23/04/12/world-bank-cafeteria-workers-contract-picket-wages/

Tech-obsessed utopian fad-chasers are going to doom us all. First they gave us crypto, which wastes vasts amounts of electricity to facilitate gambling and fraud. Now they've delivered ChatGPT, which wastes vast amounts of water to facilitate the removal of human interaction on the internet. Their stupidity truly knows no bounds, and yet they are convinced they're the smartest cats on the planet. 🤦‍♂️

https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-generative-ai-water-use-environmental-impact-study-2023-4

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01100-0